Post Category →Training

It’s been fantastic working with Drew. He has the rare ability to demystify complex subject matter for the uninitiated, yet still engage the more advanced members of the group. His workshops are interesting, practical and fun and after four training sessions we now have a team who really understand SEO, know why it’s important and feel comfortable incorporating it into our daily activities.

Drew delivered a clear, customised training session and we were all left feeling positive about how to manage our Adwords going forward. We’d highly recommend Drew, he’s obviously very switched on and good at what he does.

Last Friday, I lead a three hour training session with over 20 attendees from charities around the UK. The topic? Adwords: Getting the most of your Google Grant.

Friday afternoon can be a tough slot to give training, especially on something as dry as Google Adwords and PPC, but the time flew by, not least because the attendees were very motivated to harness that strange unicorn of a digital marketing beast – the Google Grant.

I also made sure there were lots of exercises to get us up and moving – nothing is more soporific than one person talking for three hours straight, however good the Adwords training content!

Thanks to Raising IT, whose training session it was, for organising everything and allowing me to break down the pros and cons of the Adwords Google Grant with my trademark bad jokes – and for this very kind testimonial:

Drew was an excellent trainer who made what would normally be a dry subject both fun and engaging. Our attendees gave overwhelmingly positive feedback about the session and left inspired to get the most out of their Google Grants. Highly recommended if you want Adwords training which is insightful AND funny.

I lead a very productive training session last Friday with some of the Unicef UK Fundraising team. Please note the unconventional snacks I brought for the session (pears! sugar snaps! coconut!) were very well received.

Drew delivered a lively and informative session for us, which was tailored to our needs. We felt comfortable to ask questions throughout and get the most out of the time. The pace was great and the content engaging and made relevant to us. Drew had taken time to review our questions and materials in advance and come armed with answers!

Olivia Davenport, Head of Digital Communications, RCPCH

It was a pleasure working with such a smart and enthusiastic group. Thanks guys!

Recently, I had the privilege to provide Brand and Positioning training to the Mountview MA Creative Producing students.

It was a fun afternoon, but what’s really great is this follow up blog post from the course coordinator (and my friend) Chris Grady. An extract:

“Two parts of the session connected with me yesterday and led to this reflection. The first was that, as we had done many times in the past few weeks, each person on the MA introduced themselves to our guest. In this process I invited them to tell us something which we don’t know about them, as well as introducing their standard career elevator pitch. We learned that one of the team has a small chocolate making business on the side. This enriches our understanding of them.

Drew then set us an exercise as we explored brand identity and the art of narrow cast marketing. He asked us to think of a place we love and sell it to the person on our right. A simple exercise, made so much easier if you do not pitch in and evangelise, but rather ask questions of your potential customer to find out a little more about them to help focus your own pitch. It was so much easier to sell the delights of Byron Bay, Australia when I realised by colleague loved yoga and the sun.

In each of these experiences this week there was a sense of exploration and an uncovering of the richness of a human being.”

It feels very self-serving cutting and pasting from such a beautiful and moving post, so definitely go and read it all.

Just received this very lovely testimonial from Froukje Heres at Deloitte UK:

“In July and August 2014, I have had the great opportunity to work with Drew to run three workshops on content creation. At that time we both were contracted by Deloitte UK.

The objective of the workshops was to inspire and educate internal stakeholders about writing for the web: How to start anew and how to rewrite existing content to make it more engaging and easier to read.

Drew is an expert on writing for the web, but he is also a great presenter. He knows how to perfectly mix real life examples, group discussions and exercises to engage trainees and make sure they leave with plenty of inspiration and practical tips to implement.

His sessions were well prepared and the trainee-feedback was very positive. I look forward to working with Drew again soon.”

There’s one thing you realise when you start working with Deloitte – they’re big. They have a lot of people, a lot of buildings, a lot of meeting rooms, so logistics can be quite a feat.

My style of training tends to be interactive, with a lot of group participation, so I suggested a room where we could spread out. It’s still a bit of a lottery booking rooms at Deloitte, however, and so despite very best intentions this was the one we got for the first afternoon’s training:

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice, but trust me – that’s a very long table. The northern end had snow on. You needed a passport to get from one side to the other. I’ve also never given training with ten people patched in through a conference phone before. Our “hands on” interactive training suddenly became a lot more formal. I’m not sure if the people of the phone could hear all my jokes. That might not necessarily have been a bad thing though.

Next training session, new room:

No tables this time, which was a triumph! Initially, all the chairs were facing the screen, but rolling up my sleeves I pushed them into this colosseum-style in-the-round shape. The training attendees were surprised when they arrived, maybe because they thought they might have to duke it out with each other, gladiator-style. Or maybe because they hadn’t been forced to sit in a circle like this since primary school. Nonetheless, the session was much more energised and interactive.

Training session three: disaster. When we arrived at the room, we realised it had an even longer table. It was so long, The Guinness Book of Records wanted to measure it, but ran out of measuring tape (the training is much better than these jokes – honest).

Fortunately, when I threw myself at the mercy of the meeting room co-ordinator people, they sent up two nice chaps to untether the individual table sections and move them to the back of the room (I wasn’t allowed to do it because of “health and safety” – or maybe because I was weeping):

It took some time, but it was worth it. Disaster averted, the training proceeded without another hitch.